Fedora Mono goes on a diet

For a long time, Mono on Fedora has a reputation for being bloated. A lot of it is admittedly due to our packaging: install the most trivial application and hey presto, it pulls in almost the entire stack! Here’s what happened, at least as of the state-of-the-art on Rawhide, and a similar story on the stable releases:

• mono-core contains some documentation tool, so those pull in monodoc. monodoc alone is 7MB, so plus the tools that are erroneously in mono-core, more than that is wasted at this stage
• mono-core also pulls in mono-extras and mono-web (how could mono-extras be extra if you always need to install it, you might ask? Good question! See bug 434709). These are not so bad, about 1.5MB in total
• *but* mono-web (Mono’s ASP.NET) is closely coupled with mono-winforms. And that’s 2MB.

This Gordian knot has now be unknotted. As evidenced from the following transcript, below the cut: